Robert Aspeslagh

He grew up in Tanjung Pinang on the island of Bintan until 1949. When Indonesia gained independence, he returned to the Netherlands with his parents. There, he lived in Leiden for three years and, since 1953, in Amsterdam. He decided to become a teacher and dedicated his life to imparting knowledge to young people. “Pedagogy for peace” and training a new generation of researchers at the Clingendael Institute for International Relations were key focuses of his career. During his ten years as a teacher at a school for individualized secondary education, the IVO Kindergemeenschap, his fascination with words and images grew through close collaboration with his colleagues Theo Vesseur, the poet, and Joop Willems, the painter. In 1975, Aspeslagh became a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Peace Studies (NIVV) to develop ideas and curricula for peace education and global citizenship. His contribution to the field of peace studies was also focused on international knowledge transfer, as evidenced by his book *Three Decades of Peace Education Around the World*, published by Routledge.

From 1983 to 2002, he worked as a researcher at the Clingendael Netherlands Institute of International Relations. His work focused, among other things, on minority issues in Eastern Europe, German-Dutch relations, and Indonesian affairs. In the field of German studies, the research he initiated—titled “Known but Unloved: The Image of Germany and Germans Among Young People Aged Fifteen to Nineteen”—sparked an intense public debate in the 1990s about the then-negative perception of Germany in the Netherlands. As a result of this debate, the Dutch-German Conference was established in Delft in 1996 in the presence of Prince Claus; at this conference, representatives of government and civil society meet annually to engage in an intensive exchange of views on an overarching theme. The Dutch-German Conference is held alternately in the Netherlands and Germany. From 1975 to 2002, Aspeslagh (co-)authored numerous books on peace education and international relations.

Around 2000, his focus shifted increasingly from the written word to the visual, that is, from academia to the visual arts. To further develop his skills, he took classes in drawing and painting with Rob Hessels, Tony Holsbergen, and Ronald Terpstra. In 2002, he decided to devote himself entirely to drawing and painting. He preferred working with oil paint, although he occasionally used acrylics and did not shy away from mixed media either. His greatest passion was drawing and painting portraits. The book *Poems Painted* brings together a collection of his paintings and combines them with reflections on his work. Rob passed away on October 31, 2016.